This week I made a numbered list of every photo and video on a website I am building for a youth football club, so the owner could decide what stays and what goes. The gallery alone had 82 of them.
Every one was real. Players, coaches, match days, trips to see the professionals play. The owner is proud of all of them, and he should be. My advice was still to keep the best 20 to 30, and I want to explain why, because almost every small business with a gallery has the same instinct to show everything.
Nobody looks at photo sixty
Someone opening your gallery is not browsing an album. They are deciding, in a few seconds, whether you look like the real thing. Are these people good at what they do? Does it look well run? Would I be comfortable sending my child, booking this job, walking through that door?
Your strongest photos answer that in a glance. Your weaker ones quietly argue against it. A slightly blurry shot, the back of someone's head, the fourth near identical photo of the same moment: none of them is bad on its own, but every one of them dilutes the ones that are doing the work.
Every photo is weight on the page
Most people looking at a small business website are on a phone, often on mobile data. Every photo has to download before they see it.
I resize and compress everything I put on a site. This week four short session videos went from 840MB to about 2MB between them, with no visible difference on a phone screen. But compression only goes so far. Twenty five photos will always load faster than eighty, and a page that loads fast keeps people on it.
A gallery is an argument, not an archive
The useful question is not which photos you like. It is what a new customer needs to see before they trust you. Then pick one strong photo for each answer.
For a sports club or coach that is usually:
- Real sessions, with players actually doing something
- A team photo for each age group or level
- Coaches working with players, faces visible
- Match days and the moments that matter, trophies included
- The venue, so parents know where they are going
For a trade or local service it is the same idea with different subjects: finished work, a before and after or two, you on the job, and the van or the workshop that shows you are a real business.
One photo per idea is enough. Three photos of the same idea is a scroll, not a reason.
How to pick your best 25 in one evening
- Start with everything out, then add back. Taking photos away feels like a loss. Choosing favourites feels like a win. On the club's photo list, the quickest route was to mark the whole gallery for removal and then switch the keepers back on.
- One photo per moment. If you have five shots of the same celebration, keep the sharpest one.
- Faces over backs of heads, and sharp over atmospheric. Moody and slightly out of focus looks great on Instagram and reads as careless on a website.
- Put your best three first. Plenty of visitors will never see past them.
- If children are in the photos, only use ones where you have parents' permission for them to appear online. Fewer photos also means less to keep track of.
Then rotate, do not pile up
The real problem with an 80 photo gallery is that it only ever grows. The better habit is to swap a handful each season. A gallery full of this season's photos says you are busy right now. A gallery full of photos from three years ago says you used to be.
It also gives you a reason to post. Every few new photos on the site are a few new photos for your social media and your Google Business Profile, and both of those reward businesses that look active.
If you want help deciding what your site should show, the Process page explains how I work and the Pricing page covers what a build costs. And if your gallery is fine but you suspect something else is quietly putting people off, these six small faults are worth ten minutes of your time.